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One expects the office intern to make a half-drinkable pot of coffee in between the more menial office tasks they do - filing, faxing, copying. Facebook intern Paul Butler can probably do all of that very well, but more interesting to me is what he's done with his access to Facebook's giant treasure trove of data on its user base.

In a blog post this afternoon, Butler gave us a look at what he's been up to with a stunning visualization of friendship connections between 10 million users:

"I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends," Butler wrote. "I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them."

So Butler took about a 2% sample of friendship pairs from Facebook's data warehouse, Apache Hive. "I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities," he wrote. "Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city."

What resulted was one of the nicer data visualizations I've seen in recent memory - way better than a pot of intern coffee.